Worth the Money: General Tools Carbide Scriber

While doing tool tests and working on their own projects, PopMech's DIY guys find themselves using all kinds of tools, gear, and accessories. Our Worth the Money series will let you know where spending a few extra dollars will make your life easier.

Description:A carbide scribe may seem like an obscure tool, but it's not. What the carpenter's pencil is to building houses, the carbide scribe is to building with metal. As anyone who has marked metal will tell you, a pencil doesn't work and neither do most pens. If you can get a pen to make a line, it can easily be smudged off. Even the trusty Sharpie pen makes a big fat line.

But a scribe is perfect. It marks a clean sharp line. And better still, it cuts through dirt, paint, rust, and mill scale. It's the tool to use for clean, accurate lines. Its secret is at the business end, a little sharpened rod of tungsten carbide, a material so hard it can even scribe a line on the surface of a tile. The Model 88 by General Tools is a particularly good example. Its durability is outstanding (you'll get years of use from it), and its tip is retractable (you can retract it so it doesn't poke a hole in your work shirt or coveralls). A replacement tip is $2.

As holds true with other things in life, when it comes to carbide scribes and metal working, little things mean a lot.

A Part of Hearst Digital Media
Popular Mechanics participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites.